The Perils of Party Pictures in the iPad Age

One especially busy night this fall, Marchesa designer Keren Craig hit the town. There were 1,000 parties, 1,001 party photographers, and she had to look great. These days, you never know where your picture will end up—a magazine, a blog, a magazine’s blog, a magazine’s Facebook, your mom’s Facebook. So she enlisted the pros for hair and makeup and put on a killer frock.

Then, later in the night, Craig saw a photo of herself looking, as she remembers it, “about 100 years old.” But it was through no fault of her own; it was that the shot was taken with an HD camera, which produces a supersharp image that, in this case, was also slightly distorted.

“It looked like someone had aged me for a movie,” she says. “It was horrific.”

Welcome to party pictures in the high-def, high-tech age, where HD cameras are only the start. A flick of a finger on an iPad and anyone is able to zoom in on wrinkles, dark circles, or whatever else only a lover should be close enough to see.

So how do you protect yourself against tech trauma? “You could wear sunglasses,” suggests Lisa Airan, M.D., only half joking. Her dermatology clients are also getting more Botox and fillers to fool the camera. (That’s one way to do it.)

Makeup artist Alexa Rodulfo’s trick is blotting papers—not powder—to fix a shiny face. “The more powder you use, the more you’re going to see the wrinkles,” she explains.

Unsurprisingly, society photographer Billy Farrell is all for a good zoom function. “Looking at party pictures is about satisfying a curiosity anyway,” he says. Well, yes, but that’s when you’re looking at other people. Other people looking at you is a different story.

The way Rodulfo sees it, there’s really only one surefire defense: “Carry your own lighting.”